A summary of things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

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This week SotMLatam 2017 in Lima is underway! Mappers from communities in Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico and Peru meet at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the National University of San Marcos in Peru. There is also the participation of public officials, technology researchers and open data to explore solutions for different topics.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Four people are now candidates for the two vacancies in the OSMF board of directors. The additional candidates are: Paul Norman who is seeking re-election and David Dean. Although the mailing list osmf-talk discussions can be heated, dedicated mappers will certainly find good arguments for their election decision. The discussions revolve around: gender equality (although it remains unclear how this equality is to be measured); the possible influence of HOT US Inc. on the OSMF; to a possible influence of companies; and the under-representation of areas where few people are mapping. See also the Q&A with candidates on the wiki.

The Data Working Group released a draft Directed Editing policy (formerly known as ‘Organised Editing Policy’ or ‘Paid Editing Policy’). There is a short discussion on the Talk mailing list and a longer discussion on the OSMF-Talk mailing list where some people express their concern that the policy will impede the work of humanitarian mapping activities.

After many years of activity, the OSM community in the United Kingdom announced the decision to form an official OSM Local Chapter. The formally registered organisation plans to continue the good work on improving data collection, import and use, and on strenghtening the local community.

Humanitarian OSM

Nate Smith reports about HOT’s technology planning for 2018: more recognition and validation of volunteer roles; development of further partnerships for more training and tool development; more involvement of the community in the planning of core HOT tools and processes.

The University of the Philippines is using OSM to develop resilience and natural disaster planning for its campuses.

Maps

OpenStreetMap is used in newly published paper Michelin maps for the islands of La Reunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe.

switch2OSM

Milad Moradi points out an MSc thesis on the quality of OSM for the Canadian road network. Hongyu Zhang from the University of Western Ontario finds OSM data is of comparable quality to other sources.

Open Data

The UK Finance Minister Phillip Hammod announced that a new Geospatial Commission will be formed to maximise the value of all UK government data linked to location. The mention of the possibility of the release of the national map agency (Ordnance Survey) MasterMap has excited lots of commentary: here, here and here; discussion on talk-gb; and a statement from OSM-UK.

Programming

Oleksiy Muzalyev writes that he has written a simple tool to report averaged values of ele tags on OpenStreetMap

Simone Primarosa (aka simoneepri) published a tool that
extracts GeoJSONs of the boundaries of OpenStreetMap and other open databases.

OSM in the media

Bike Citizens Mobile Solutions a Graz software company (automatic translation) helps cities to better understand cycling. Their app allows cyclists to share issues with the cycle network. This generates data that provides information about behavior, obstacles or the choice of routes in urban cycling. Kofler explains, “We help the city planners to better understand the cycling traffic and thus adjust the infrastructure accordingly,”

Other “geo” things

Richard Fairhurst uses a railway map to offer a few hints about poor cartographic choices.

Helios Pro, an augmented reality app for iPhone and iPad, uses, among other data sources, OpenStreetMap buildings to render a 3D reconstruction of buildings.

GIS finds its space on campus at the Center For Geospatial Analysis (CGA), it is housed on the second floor of the Earl Gregg Swem Library. This would become a space for anyone who is working on any type of GIS project.

Ahmed Loai Ali from the University of Bremen looks for participants for a study on the influence of human cognition on data classification in OSM.

Wired suggests that “cartography is the new code” and that there is a developing skills shortage of skilled cartographers.

The weekly journal “Der Spiegel” published an article “How to dream” and talks about four interesting books (also for the wish list 😉 ) (automatic translation) – Please observe all books are available in English as well.

Alastair Bonnett, New Views, The World Mapped Like Never Before: 50 maps of our physical, cultural and political world

Edward Brooke-Hitching, The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps

Georg Braun, Franz Hogenberg, Cities of the World, The Colored Tables from 1572-1617

Jasmine Desclaux-Salachas, The Art of Cartographics

The MIT Media Lab Emerging Worlds programme discusses on their blog the suitability of various address schemes for India.

Editoryal Sayfa – Hakkımızda – İletişim

What is the idea?

weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.